Hello, I am new to this but very appreciative of the information I have found here so far. I have a few issues that I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.
How can you wake t-beams from the app when they are no longer connected to the phone without having to press the reset button? I am noticing they drop overnight.
*The GPS has been inconsistent. Sometimes I get a red flashing light, some times I don’t, sometimes I have a flashing LED but no coordinates in the app. Any pointers here one what I should look for to improve that?
How can I get the name to stick and survive a reset? I am not exactly sure what I did but I believe I set them up the same however one will retain its name the other will lose it with most changes.
Similarly my channel changes on reset and I have to resync the channel on the nodes. Is there a way to make that stick? Ideally I would not have to reset to get them to work but knowing if there is a fix for this as well would help since some hiking trips are remote and it wouldn’t be possible to resync when separated.
Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. I hope to get up to speed and help with the effort.
I would first take a look at the docs pages for power and the power state machine (Power Settings | Meshtastic). I often set is_always_powered to true while testing to ensure consistent sleep behavior. I believe there is significant ongoing optimization in the wake settings for the ESP32 and most efforts seem to strongly prioritize battery life (rightfully so).
GPS has been a mixed bag for me with my older tbeams. I have found hard resets and power cycling to be the most reliable for restoring gps when “no GPS module” errors are displayed.
You are describing issues with the red flashing light which is directly controlled by the uBlox module. When obtaining a fix for the first time, the module needs to download a significant amount of data from the GPS satellites and this can take up to an hour if your signal is weak.
I don’t believe name settings will ever stick after a settings reset unless you backup to .yaml and restore with the flasher application. Unless you are having name loss after pressing the reset button, that’s a problem I’ve never seen and maybe I suggest ensuring you are on the latest stable release.
What version are you running? later releases have many bugfixes related to what you describe.
We are actually cleaning up and removing a lot of them as they are confusing, the is_always_powered is a hack for devices without a battery pin for example, just sucking up power on a tbeam and not doing anything for you other than keeping the screen on
Thanks for that clarification. I had thought is always powered acted similarly to router mode where it prevented all kinds of sleep states. I’ve always had better reliability on my Wi-Fi client nodes around the house with that hack enabled.